11 Apr
A Chinese man got smashed to the ground by SWAT outside the US Capitol building today… They then dragged him by his arms across the plaza in front of the Capitol (where Presidential inaugurations take place) to a construction trailer where they questioned him. While they were questioning him, they x-rayed and blew up his luggage, safely destroying the “solid mass” (CD player, and spare batteries), wires (headphones) and timing device (pocket watch) which they found inside.
Well, I’m not saying they overreacted, but I’m a little bit nervous about carrying my baby’s diaper bag with me when I go sight-seeing this summer. Seems like the could have found a calmer way of dealing with what appears to have been a protester with his luggage. They’ve charged him with disobeying an order from a police officer for not evacuating. Edit: Turns out according to reuters the man is an Australian citizen, so they’re just going to expel him for violating the “public safety” provision of his visa.
You can watch the video from Fox News, or use Blinkx to search for other video or read The New York Times article which has the most details I’ve seen so far.
The worst quote in the articles is of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) who praised the Capitol Police officers’ performance saying “What they did to get ready to take that man down was extraordinary,” Reid said. “We have the finest-trained police force of any place in the country.” I’m not sure what they did getting ready to take him down, but what they did taking him down is on camera, and it looked like something out of a WWF playbook, and the way they dragged him looked like something from a high school hazing ritual. Maybe he was referring to how safely they destroyed the guy’s personal stereo.
My theory is that he came over to protest the US’s growing friendship with the totalitarian communist regime in China despite their continuing human rights violations, and he certainly made his point in spades … I hope I don’t come off too much like an anti-government freak, but I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the video of the guy being dragged away, it reminded me of the worst World Bank protests gone wrong. You gotta love the Fox news take on it: “A man standing still seems threatening to Capitol police …”
Edit: So yeah, I’ve waited a day, and I’m still a bit upset about how roughly they handled this guy, but I still don’t really have any suggestions about how else they could have handled what was essentially a bomb scare. I mean, what it amounts to is that the cops are a bit paranoid, and are doing their best to not assume that only middle-easterners can be terrorists. Lesson learned: if a cop is nervous, you should be nervous. By all accounts the guy was treated for minor abrasions and is being held by immigration pending his presumably uncontested expulsion.